Yoko Ono: 'Who's the best? Me'

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Yoko Ono will be awarded the Inspiration Award at the NME Awards tonight. In this archive interview first published in July 2013, she talks about her terrifying singing, her love of Lady Gaga and how she's the only artist she admires

The afternoon is overcast, and we’re inside. But Yoko Ono is still wearing a pair of shiny black shades. She studies me over the brims like a playful librarian, then springs up from the sofa of her luxurious hotel suite with such grasshopper vim that it’s hard to believe the woman John Lennon famously described as “the world’s most famous unknown artist” turned 80 earlier this year. “Energy is so important,” she likes to say. “If you don’t have it, don’t bother with rock and roll.”

She’s in London in her role as curator of this year’s Meltdown Festival, which places an accent on “pure ‘female’ energy” in particular. Her line-up includes “powerful-headed” older women like Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith and Marianne Faithfull who she tells me has “created something incredible with her voice. She had that pretty voice when she was young and now she’s using this rich resonance.

We fell in love with that. All of us women heard it and thought: we can do that. "Of course, we couldn’t. But she made us feel that we could. I think a lot of women learned from her that age is fine. And I think for Meltdown she’s going to be doing something very different from what she does usually. She’s still attempting to change.”

There was clearly sexism and racism at work in the media portrayals of her. "John Lennon’s Excrusive Gloupie" ran one notorious 1970 Esquire headline over an unflattering photograph

Ono has always been an avowed feminist. The first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, she challenged cultural perceptions of female passivity through the music and performance art she was making long before she met her third husband, John Lennon, when he attended one of her exhibitions in 1966.

He climbed a ladder leading up to a canvas suspended from the ceiling, with a spyglass hanging from it on the end of a chain. Through the glass he read the word “YES” printed in tiny letters. In a counterculture context in which the avant garde were against everything, her positivity appealed to his quirky sense of humour — and they fell in love.

As a “Beatle-wife” Ono helped her famous husband to publicly acknowledge his former chauvinism and the pair ended up writing songs like the controversially titled Woman is the Nigger of the World. “We make her paint her face and dance,” they sang in 1972.

“If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love us/ If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man/ While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us”. Lennon’s most famous solo song was inspired by a poem from Ono’s Grapefruit book, published before they met: “Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in your garden to put them in.”

Although he took all the songwriting credit, Lennon later said that it “should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song. A lot of the lyric and the concept came from Yoko, but in those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit.”

I thought: why is woman always known for pretty voice and pretty songs? Because that’s what the world wants. They don’t want a woman to sound too strong.

There was clearly sexism and racism at work in the media portrayals of her. "John Lennon’s Excrusive Gloupie" ran one notorious 1970 Esquire headline over an unflattering photograph. Even today, internet trolls make their case against her on the grounds that she wasn’t conventionally attractive enough to deserve the attention of a male superstar who they never seem to notice was no conventional Adonis himself.

However, this doesn’t mean that finding her singing unbearable, or her artwork empty and pretentious necessarily makes you racist and/or sexist. She’s cryptic, conceptual, confusing and as we talk it becomes clear she has no interest in making my understanding of her any easier.

Yoko Ono with Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera in February

She evades questions or ignores them, offering polite platitudes and gnomic smiles. Her art can be funny, empowering and warm — or naive, cliched and vain. Most of us have wondered what was going on with her voice, which I can find thrilling or jarring depending on the context and my mood.

She tells me: “When I was a very very young girl, my mother said ’Don’t ever go to the servants’ room because they’re talking about things that you shouldn’t know. Well, that’s a fine introduction! So I slipped out and went very near the room and heard these two young girls, one was talking about her aunt in hospital giving birth. And she was going: Ahh! — ahhh!— ahhh! ahhh! Well, I got scared and I ran away.

"But that experience stayed with me. And I thought: why is woman always known for pretty voice and pretty songs? Because that’s what the world wants. They don’t want a woman to sound too strong. We feel we shouldn’t scream out. So I thought we have to show what women are, we’re the birthgivers of the human race.

"Why should we be ashamed of it or treated differently? Of course, when I started to show it, most people thought it was terrible. I was aware that I was doing something unique and important. But they thought: how dare she? So when I was doing a recording, even the engineers all went to bathroom. There’s a tape somewhere of John saying: “Are you getting that?”’ She laughs. “But John really took to my way of singing. He understood.”

Yet, there were many strong female voices in popular music — Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin – before Ono. And I’m not entirely sure she sounds like any labouring woman I’ve ever heard. I sounded like a cow under a steamroller while delivering my children and while I’m proud of the ’strong, female energy’ it took to bring my kids into the world I don’t think I’d want the album, any more — to continue the gender stereotyping – than I’d want to listen to the moans of men wounded in war.

Yoko Ono and John Lennon - Bed-In for Peace, 1969Credit:
AP

Then again, Ono began doing this at a time when men’s pain was acknowledged all over the 6 O’ Clock news, while men still obliviously smoked cigars down the hallway from the maternity ward. What makes Ono a feminist proto-punk – as opposed to a women expressing vocal strength – is that she wanted her sound to be disruptive and provocative.

In fact, a lot of her music — like 2009’s Between My Head and The Sky – is also really good if you give it a shot: fearless, experimental and electrifying. Like her art — in which she tells you to burn her book, sleep on her paintings, cut pieces from her clothing – Ono’s music works by making space and asking questions of the audience.

In a compelling essay for the New York Times last year, Lisa Carver wrote that: “It takes an enormous lack of ego to not put your imprint on everything you do, to not employ your learning and position. [Ono] could sing; she knows how. And being a Beatle’s wife could have been a magic charm but she wasn’t interested. To be accepted, to be thought nice, is traditionally woman’s power. That is something Ono doesn’t need.”

The flip side of this ego-vacuum is the attention-seeking diva who crawled onto the piano while Lady Gaga was singing at a performance of the Plastic Ono Band in 2010. The pair ended up writhing about there in high heels until musical director – Ono’s son Sean Lennon — got the musicians to wrap things up. She tells me that although she once let anybody who was “feeling it” join in, she’s “pretty much a tyrant” when it comes to her band.

Boy George, also appearing at this year’s Meltdown and who covered Ono’s The Death of Samantha on his last album said recently that he’s “one of those weird people who really love her music, and who argues with people all the time because people do write her off. What I like about her is that she obviously doesn’t need the money: she’s not doing this to make a buck. And I just like the noise she makes.”

Yoko Ono speaks during the global launch of the UNICEF IMAGINE project in 2014

The festival will also feature a performance of Ono’s best performance art work: Cut Piece, the one in which audience members are invited onto stage to cut pieces from her clothing.

First performed in 1964, she tells me that as a young woman she was “too involved with being complacent” to study the people who approached her brandishing scissors. But although the work comments on societal control over a woman’s image, she never felt vulnerable on stage: “If I felt too intimidated I wouldn’t have done it.”

When she first felt the metal against her skin she was a cult artist. Later performances would call into question the public’s response to John Lennon’s wife. I was surprised to go back and read, in her description of the piece, that the performer does not have to be female.

John Lennon's sketch of the coupleCredit:
Frederic J Brown/AFP Photo

Although she tells me that: “I went to one where a man was performing. And I think because of shyness or something they made it into a joke, you know. So it wasn’t that interesting.”

Which artists does Ono admire today? “Myself.” she says. “Because I’m the only one who knows how much I did, using my energy and effort and learning so much about life. And after turning 80 I thought: well, I’ve learned a lot.”

She’s asked Canadian electronica artist Peaches to take on her Cut Piece role at Meltdown. A career-long subverter of gender roles, Ono says: “I think Peaches is gonna do a great job. She’s like an Egyptian Queen. Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it’s more casual but more interesting.

Ono performing Cut Piece in 2003

“Lady Gaga did an incredible performance art piece in New York. Just her sleeping and if you wanted to say ‘hello’ you could put your hand in to touch her. It was beautifully done.” Did Ono reach in? “I didn’t have the nerve to! But I think Lady Gaga’s amazing. “Born this Way” is a great statement song. So freeing.”

Ono’s Meltdown will also include elements of artist activism and the first live performance of the album Double Fantasy: released three weeks before John Lennon was gunned down outside of the Dakota Building, where Ono still lives (“Where else would I go, it was our home?”).

She tells me that she doesn’t know the line-up yet, but promises “it will be very interesting. I don’t think many people want to sing it. They get intimidated because Double Fantasy is so famous.”

Will it be very emotional for Ono? “I get emotional at anything,” she smiles. “I always get totally emotional when I hear I’m Losing You”. Famously, the song was written when Lennon couldn’t get through to Ono on the phone, and it deals with his guilt over his affair with May Pang. Ono tells me she still feels guilty for not answering the phone.

Annie Liebovitz's photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in December 1980 on the last day of Lennon's lifeCredit:
Annie Liebovitz/AP Photo/Swann Auction Galleries

Was she avoiding his call? “No, I wasn’t avoiding it so much as being busy. I was doing an installation work in Shea Stadium (where the Beatles performed their biggest record-breaking show in 1965) and I was trying to arrange things and I came home and they said the phone rang many times.” But if you’d answered it, I say, we wouldn’t have the song. “I know,” nods Ono. But her mood has shifted and she is sad.

Is it hard for an artist whose life’s work is devoted to moving on and living in the moment, to spend so much of her time shackled to the past, curating her husband’s legacy? “One part of me is so glad that I didn’t make a real boob, just stick my tongue out. I was very seriously making work that would mean something. But the emphasis for me should be now and the future.”

After an hour together I still cannot make her out. There is so much to admire and so much to doubt. Do those shades represent the “black hole” Lennon’s first son, Julian, described her as. Or are they a witty philosopher’s mirrors? Maybe Ono's a little of both and maybe she’s beyond caring what we think. As she tells me: “Everything has complexity. Everything has simplicity. You just grab it.”